infoarch

I've promised Bill Ives that I'd write a blogpost about Darwin Awareness Engine a long time ago. Finally, here's my post about this new and interesting service. Sorry it took so long... How do you keep up with the news, tweets, updates and feeds? We live in the wonderful world of information abundance. But many feel overwhelmed by the amount and speed of information. Some even talk about information overload. I described how I keep up with what's going on  in the world and in my area's of interest. But can't it be better? Yes, it can. This is where all kinds of new(er) solutions pop up. Like Techmeme and Postrank . There's even talk of Web Squared, Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web , which should help us filter through loads of information coming at us. Not just by highlighting 'the best tweets and feeds', but my semantically analyzing and summarizing the information. The Darwin Awareness Engine fits in this movement. And I think they're do...

Wow, this is very interesting ! Memolane, a timeline for all your social media traces. One of the things that popped up when I saw this was: hey, this is great way to find back old tweets (as Twitter search being so aweful...). And, wouldn't this also be great for a business environment ? It would tell you when you sent emails, checked-in/-out documents, searched for information on the intranet, etc.? What I understand is that Memolane is not moving into this space. Business opportunity!

Every now and then I run into something that really gets me thinking. Recently I ran into this presentation . ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? View more presentations from Chris Messina . I went through it several times. And I think I'll do so in the coming days. Really great stuff!! Activity Streams: what are they, how can we collect and understand them? This presentation focuses on public streams, mostly on the internet. But does this story also extend to the streams behind the firewall, inside organization? I think it should, but I'm thinking about how this should work. Of course the firewalls are coming down. But companies will still be protecting their information to a certain extent. My thesis is: These streams will be most useful if the distinction between protected and public information is mixed. What do you think? And how do you think one stream of internal and external information can be devised? I'd love to hear your thoughts. (No...

The big news in the Web 2.0 world is, of course: Facebook is taking over Friendfeed . Lately there has been lots of buzz about the war between Twitter and Friendfeed, between Twitter and Google, and between Google and Facebook. Oh yeah, Microsoft is also playing along, by taking over Yahoo en starting Bing. For starters, I'm happy with Facebook's move. The Web 2.0 will converge (or is it already?) and still is a step in that direction. As a user of Facebook and Friendfeed I hoped they were merge in time. Although current plans don't seem to point in that direction . Secondly, we all see the 'real-time web' as the future. Friendfeed contributed to this movement. Friendfeed also nicely merges all my and that of my friend's/follower's information streams in one neat stream. Facebook has been copying this FF feature, but is now basically paying for it. Finally, and this is what I wanted to get at, these movements are interesting for companies as well. N...

Some time ago I started using FriendFeed. I'd heard about it on the internet. I thought I'd try it when I had time. So I went over to get an account and see what it was like for real. The idea of Friendfeed is compelling: integrate all your internet streams into one stream. Friendfeed helps you read all your and your friends social media updates in one spot. That's exactly what I need. Before Friendfeed, I would check different sites I use, such as Twitter (or actually Tweetdeck), Slideshare, Diigo and Youtube. After setting up my account I had a hard time starting to use FF. One of the big issues for me was: who is on FF and who is on Twitter? And how do I import all my Twitter friends to FF, without duplicating? This basically is too difficult for most users, I think. I used the 'Twitter2FF' tool , which helps. I ended up writing down lists on paper to make sure I didn't duplicate and really have all my Twitter friend in FF. Furthermore some Twitter friends...